Politicians work hard to manage their images. There are the times it’s gone terribly wrong

My brief tonight is to look at how political portraits capture defining political moments and reframe national conversations. And to talk about what, if anything, they reveal about these men and women we see so much of in the daily news. How they connect with, and even influence the identity of the politicians who lead us.

Now, I show you this portrait with profuse apologies to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton because it is on the public record that his media minders really, really didn’t like this picture. It was taken in 2016 in Parliament House, by the renowned press gallery photojournalist Alex Ellinghausen. Alex works for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and he is one of the best in the business.

The photo was taken on budget day, when most of the journalists in the press gallery are in the hostage situation which is known as the budget lock-up. But Dutton, who was then immigration minister, wasn’t in the lock-up. He called a press conference in what’s known as the Blue Room of Parliament House.

The unflattering photo that Peter Dutton’s minders did not want published.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Alex Ellinghausen also wasn’t in the lock-up. And as a consequence, his workload was a little lighter that day. He had a little more time and freedom to experiment. He positioned himself below Dutton, who was at the podium speaking, and when he pressed the shutter button, the light projected upwards, the podium cropped the light, and the result was the mask-like effect we see.

When Alex went back to the bureau office, he showed the photo to his colleague Andrew Meares. Mearsey, as we call him, told me that when they reviewed the picture, they knew it would be controversial and unflattering, but asked themselves, “On what grounds would we censor it?”

They couldn’t answer that question, so, in the interests of objectivity, they decided to file it to the editors. They decided that if they censored it, that would be a political act in itself.

Stephanie Peatling, a senior editor still with the Herald, tweeted the picture with the caption “Eek”, and Dutton’s media team saw it, and rang to ask her to remove it. After some negotiation, she agreed, but on the proviso that she post a statement about why she was removing it.

But as we know, despite its ephemeral nature, social media does not forget. The photograph was retweeted and turned into dozens of memes, none of them very nice. Dutton was compared to Voldemort and Darth Vader and other unkind things.

It was a classic own goal. Dutton’s office had tried to shut the image down, but they ended up publicising it more widely. So why did Dutton’s office care so much about one bad picture? Because they knew its potential power. They knew it could help cement an image that Dutton is even now, all these years later, still trying to dislodge. That he is hard, cold, unfeeling.

I don’t say these things are true about him, I only point out that a politician can do many things in his career, but one or two images of him may end up summing him up for voters in a way that he doesn’t like. Or that he thinks is unfair. Untruthful, even. That is the power of a portrait.

That is why politicians want so badly to control their images – because they know that when the image is out there, published, in the political ether, it is not their property any more. It doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us, the voters. It becomes ours.

The combination of digital photography, the smartphone and the internet has led to an explosion of images. Those images can be distributed globally in a near-instant process we call “going viral”. We live in an age where the manipulation of images is commonplace, and increasingly hard to spot. No wonder politicians want to assert some control, some sovereignty, over their own images.

It has become commonplace for prime ministers and opposition leaders to have their own official photographers, while every day politicians’ offices send out alerts for what are known as “picfacs”, which are stage-managed picture opportunities meant to document the rather visually boring business of government.

Of course, sometimes picfacs can go terribly wrong – case in point, this staged photo op of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard during the disastrous 2010 election campaign, not long after Gillard had knifed Rudd for the prime ministership. It was meant to show a united front. But the body language does not lie.

The more that politicians and their offices, not to mention AI models and Russian internet trolls and malevolent state actors and god knows who else, all manipulate images and try to control the taking of those images, the more urgent and important real political portraiture becomes. Because in a post-truth world, it is still a source of truth.

The body language says it all in this photo of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard in 2010.Credit: Andrew Meares

There are two forms of political portraiture I want to talk about tonight. Each form has a different intention and a different place, but each informs the other, and both have an equal role in this ecosystem of political truth I am trying to invoke.

The first kind is the formal political portraits, the ones that are considered and commissioned. In these kinds of formal political portraits, the sitter gives time to the artist or photographer, and there is usually some trust or rapport between the two. These kinds of formal portraits signify honour and status, particularly when they’re displayed in a public place like this, our esteemed National Portrait Gallery.

The other form of portraiture I want to discuss is political news photography. These are the moments captured candidly during the daily tumble of the news cycle. These on-the-fly photographs give ordinary voters a true sense of an event, rather than the stage-managed version that serves as little more than propaganda for the politician. These images lift the curtain a little bit. They let us in. These are the kinds of photographs we love to see during an election campaign, like the one we are about to enter.

Mike Bowers, the legendary press gallery photographer, told me that the former senator Stephen Conroy once said to him: “You guys are snipers, and you’re out to kill us.”

The remark is telling because it’s a little bit true, and because, when it comes to these kinds of portraits, we, the voters, know whose side we are on. We are with the snipers. We would rather look at something with more drama, more movement, more truth than a boring old picfac.

We would much rather look at the photo of Tony Abbott eating an onion or the picture of then-opposition leader Mark Latham attempting to intimidate prime minister John Howard with a crushing handshake outside a radio studio. (Or as I like to call the image, The Fragility of Mark Latham’s Ego.)

We want to see an angry bushfire victim refusing to shake Scott Morrison’s hand. We want to see Julia Gillard losing her shoe during a chaotic riot. We want to see Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann smoking cigars in the parliamentary courtyard, with what looked like post-coital satisfaction, the night before they delivered the 2014 budget, which cut services and famously divided Australians into “lifters” and “leaners”.

There is a fundamental tension in political portraiture that doesn’t exist in other kinds. It is the conflict between what the subject wants to project and what the portraitist sees, with the added delicious tension of what we, the viewer, the voter, bring to what we see. That’s where the alchemy happens. That’s where the uncontrollable happens. That’s where freedom is, and that’s where democracy is.

Only 17 of Australia’s 31 prime ministers are in the NPG collection, and it is a delightfully random selection.

The first one, in chronological order, is poor old George Reid, whose portrait is in the form of a paperweight made from Lithgow iron. Reid was rather a rotund man and cartoonists had a lot of fun with him. He was only PM for 10 months, resigning on July 5, 1905. But during his prime ministership he made a mark – most notably, he established an arbitration court for settling industrial disputes, a major federal reform.

By all accounts, Reid had a good sense of humour, so perhaps he wouldn’t mind being immortalised as a paperweight that makes him look a bit like George Christensen in a morning suit. But the portrait, such as it is, tells us a fair bit about his place in history, or how his place in history has been treated, thus far.

George Reid paperweight.Credit: National Portrait Gallery of Australia

Compare and contrast to another of the NPG’s portraits – a sketch by Sir William Dobell of the great Robert Menzies. Dobell had been commissioned by Time magazine to paint Menzies for the cover of its April 1960 issue. Dobell only got two sittings with the PM, and this was one of his preparatory sketches. In it, Menzies projects power. The final version is held by the Art Gallery of NSW. Dobell has inserted an Australian coat of arms in there. Menzies is much larger than the figurative depiction of the nation over which he presides. But how much of this meaning can we eke from the painting alone, and how much meaning are we placing on the painting, knowing what we know now about Menzies, a political giant?

This is the magical part, the alchemy I referred to before. Dobell had his intention going into this portrait session. The prime minister himself presumably knew what he wanted to project, more or less. The portrait is in dialogue with the political discourse around Menzies, at this point in our history. And ultimately, the real meaning of the portrait comes from us, the people.

Dobell’s preparatory sketch and the subsequent portrait for Time.Credit: National Portrait Gallery/Art Gallery of NSW

Now, Tony Abbott was an absolute boon to political portraiture. There is the famous photograph of him ironing: there is the onion-eating photo I mentioned before: there is that photo of him apparently sniffing the hair of a woman on the campaign trail. This is just a random selection, but it shows the influence of political portraiture in shaping a leader’s image.

Abbott’s controversial chief of staff Peta Credlin was renowned for policing those images because she knew precisely what their power was. But actually, the images are given meaning through their context. As we look at them, we are participating in the stories behind the photographs. It is a sort of puzzle – we are putting things together, putting together the stories and images, to work out who Tony Abbott really is.

These images have accrued layers of meaning since they were taken, as we stand back with time and distance to assess Abbott’s political legacy. And even though they cannot possibly sum up the complexity of Abbott, they do confirm some of the things the electorate came to believe about the man. Essentially, that he might be a little odd, and that he had very traditional views about the place of women in society, that might be out of keeping with contemporary values.

Now let’s look at a portrait that Abbott sanctioned – his official prime ministerial portrait which hangs in the Prime Ministers Gallery in Parliament House. He is commanding, with a powerful masculine stance, both hands on his hips, looking off to the side, not at the viewer. His sleeves are rolled up, showing he is a man of action, and his firefighter’s helmet is placed among books and framed photographs on the shelves behind him. It is a frank, faithful and, I would say, very true portrait of an extraordinary prime minister. It is the opposite of the sniper trying to kill him. It is a friendly portrait by an artist the sitter trusts. But he has managed to capture some truth.

Here I will segue sharply to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a murderous dictator notorious for disappearing his political enemies. A man who, in 2022, invaded Russia’s peaceful democratic neighbour Ukraine, causing unfathomable suffering as a result.

In 2007, the renowned English photographer Platon Antoniou was asked to take a portrait of Putin for Time magazine, which was featuring him as their Man of the Year. In a black BMW, he was taken to Putin’s private dacha “in the middle of a dark gothic forest outside Moscow”. There were snipers everywhere and the ground was thick with snow.

He was escorted into the building at gunpoint and made to wait in another room for nearly five hours. When he finally had his allotted time with Putin, he was nervous. He needed to find a neutral topic. Some chit-chat to relax the dictator. So he talked to Putin about … the Beatles.

The image that Vladimir Putin loved.Credit: AP

Was Putin a Beatles fan, he asked? “I love the Beatles!” said the Russian president in perfect English.

“Who is your favourite Beatle?” the photographer asked. Paul, came the answer. And what was the president’s favourite Beatles song? “Yesterday,” Putin said. “Think about it.”

Putin allowed Platon to get very close to him – an inch from his face. He says he could feel the dictator’s breath on his hand as he took this portrait. The thing that stands out most for me in this photo is the ice-blue frigidity of Putin’s eyes, his direct gaze, and his projection of absolute dominance. As Platon said: “It is the face of cold authority.”

Putin reportedly loved the photo. But what’s interesting about it is that it has been claimed by Russian opposition activists, including LGBTIQ rights campaigners, who use it to depict the cold, murderous nature of the regime they’re rebelling against.

The portrait might have had one intention, and one meaning when it was created, but it has been taken by the people of Russia, and the rest of the world, and used as they see fit.

This portrait is important because it answers the question we ask of all our political leaders, whether or not we are lucky enough to be able to vote them in, or vote them out. It asks and answers the most basic of human questions – who are you? It is a joint search for truth.

And while the politician can attempt to massage that truth, he or she cannot ultimately control it once it’s taken. It is the property of everyone who sees it. And we are free to make whatever meaning from it we want.

And that is what makes political portraiture more urgent and more important than ever, as global politics is roiled by the worst assaults on democracy we have seen in generations. Because portraits give us a glimpse of truth and allow us to make up our own minds about it. That is freedom, and it must always be protected.

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